Legends

by Robert Littell

  And then his street sense kicked in—he felt the eyes burning into the back of his neck before he caught sight of the scavengers edging into view from behind buildings around the intersection. There were five of them, all wearing canvas laced leggings and canvas gloves that stretched to the elbows and glass face masks that Uzbek cotton farmers used when their crops were being dusted. Each of the men wore a curved Cossack saber from his belt and cradled a vintage bolt-action rifle in the crook of an arm, with a condom over the muzzle to protect the barrel from sand and moisture. Martin’s fingers instinctively slipped behind his back to where his automatic would have been if he’d been armed with one.

  One of the scavengers motioned for Martin to raise his hands over his head. Another came over and frisked him for weapons. Martin’s hands were secured in front of him at the wrists with a dog’s leash and he was pulled around a corner and down a side street. When he stumbled, a rifle butt jabbed him sharply between the shoulder blades. Two blocks farther along a door was pushed open and Martin was prodded into a building and across a lobby with only a handful of its white marble tiles still in place. He and the others splashed across a shallow trough filled with a liquid that smelled of disinfectant, then walked under a shower head that sprayed him and the guards with a fine mist of disinfectant. He could hear the voices of other scavengers, speaking in a strange language he couldn’t identify, exchanging remarks with the five who had brought him in. Double doors were jerked open and Martin found himself in an auditorium with most of the folding seats unbolted and stacked against one wall. Eight men wearing white laboratory coats and latex gloves were sitting on the few seats still intact. Slouched in a high-backed throne-like wooden chair set in the middle of the stage, with a painted backdrop from an old socialist realist operetta behind him, the warlord presided over the assemblage. He was a dwarf of a man, so short that his feet didn’t reach the ground, and dressed in a rough gray sleeveless scapular that plunged to the tops of spit-shined paratrooper boots resting on an upturned ammunition box. His bare arms were as muscular as a weight lifter’s. He wore a shoulder holster over the scapular, with the steel grip of a large navy revolver jutting from it. The old-fashioned motorcycle goggles covering his eyes gave him the appearance of an insect. A stiff czarist-era admiral’s hat sat atop his oversized head. He talked for several minutes in a low growl with one of the men in jumpsuits standing behind him before raising his head to look directly at Martin. Lifting one stubby arm, he gestured for him to approach and, his voice pitched girlishly high, barked something in the strange language of the scavengers.

  At a loss for a response, Martin mumbled “Uh-huh.”

  From the back of the auditorium, a girl’s voice translated. “He insists to know for what reason you come to Kantubek.”

  Martin stole a glance behind him. Almagul was standing inside the auditorium door, an armed scavenger on either side of her. She smiled nervously at him as he turned back to the warlord and saluted him. “Explain to him,” he called over his shoulder, “that I am a journalist from Canada.” He produced a laminated ID card identifying him as a wire service reporter and waved it in the air. “I am writing an article on the philanthropist Samat Ugor-Zhilov, who is said to have come to Vozrozhdeniye Island when he left Prague.”

  When Almagul translated Martin’s reply, the warlord bared his teeth in disbelief. He snarled something in a high-pitched voice to the men standing behind the throne, causing them to titter. The warlord kicked over the ammunition box so that his feet danced in the air as he raged at the girl standing in the back of the auditorium. When he ran out of breath he slouched back into the throne. Almagul came up behind Martin. “He tells you,” she said in a low, frightened voice, “that Samat Ugor-Zhilov is the governor of this island and the director of Kantubek’s experimental weapons programs.”

  The muffled voices talking to each other in an unintelligible language had worked their way into the texture of Martin’s dream; he decided he was Lincoln Dittmann at Triple Border, listening to the Saudi he’d later identified as Osama bin Laden conferring with the Egyptian Daoud. When he finally realized that the men weren’t speaking in Arabic, he forced himself through the membrane that separated sleep from wakefulness and sat up. It took a moment for his eyes to become accustomed to the dim light cast by feeble bulbs burning in sockets on the stone walls of the vaulted basement. He reached out and touched the cold bars and remembered that the guards had forced him into a low cage, the kind used to house monkeys in laboratories. He could make out Almagul curled up on a pile of rags in the cage next to his. Beyond her cage were other cages—more than he could count. Eight of them contained prisoners sleeping on the floor or sitting with their backs to the bars, dozing with their bearded chins on their chests.

  Near the stone staircase, three men in white lab coats stood around a high stainless-steel table talking among themselves. Martin could hear their voices. Gradually a migraine mushroomed behind his eyes and he felt himself being sucked into another identity—one in which the language the men were speaking seemed vaguely familiar; to his astonishment he discovered that he understood fragments.

  … very stable, even in sunlight.

  … the advantage of anthrax over plague. Sunlight renders plague stock harmless.

  … should concentrate on anthrax.

  … I agree … especially pulmonary anthrax, which is extremely lethal.

  … Q fever persists for months in sand.

  … What are you suggesting? … bombard New York with sand and then attack America with Q fever?

  … still think we are making a mistake focusing on bacterial agents, which are, in general, difficult to stabilize, difficult to weaponize.

  Of course! The men were speaking Russian, a language Martin had studied in college in what seemed like a previous incarnation. He remembered the shrink at the Company clinic telling him of a case where one alter personality was able to speak a language that the other personalities didn’t understand. It was a perfect example, she’d said, of how compartmented legends can be in the brain.

  … not going to make the case for nerve agents over bacterial agents again, are you? Samat himself decided the question months ago.

  … Samat said we could revisit the issue at any point in our program. Nerve agents—VX in particular, but Soman and Sarin also—can be deadly.

  … they have serious manufacturing problems.

  … I want to remind you that tabun is relatively easy to manufacture.

  … Tabun is only moderately stable.

  … we are turning in circles … try one of the hemorrhagic fevers—the Ebola, for instance—on one of our clients.

  … Ebola is taking us down a dead-end street. I grant you it is lethal but it is also relatively unstable, which makes an ebola program problematic.

  … still, we have the spores Konstantin developed in his laboratory, so we might as well test them on one of the guinea pigs.

  … only eight guinea pigs left.

  … not to worry … two new ones.

  The three scientists, if that’s what they were, fitted on Russian army gas masks equipped with enormous charcoal filters. One of them selected a test tube from a cluster in a refrigerator and, removing the wax seal with a pocket knife, carefully poured a single drop of yellowish liquid onto a wad of cotton in a petri dish and quickly covered it with a glass lid. The scientists pulled a low table up to the cage at the far end of the basement and positioned a small ventilator so that it would blow over the petri dish into the cage. The bearded giant of a man sitting with his back to the bars in the cage rocked forward onto his knees and began to shout at the men in the language of the scavengers. His ranting woke the other prisoners. Almagul climbed onto her knees and, grasping the bars, yelled at the men in lab coats in Uzbek. The prisoner in the cage next to hers began raging at them, too. Almagul looked at Martin, her face contorted with terror. “They are experimenting on one of the scavengers,” she cried, pointing toward the men in white lab coa
ts.

  In the last cage, the bearded man sank back onto his haunches and, covering his mouth with the tail of his shirt, breathed through the fabric. One of the scientists brought over a Sony camera attached to a tripod and began filming the prisoner. Another scientist checked the time on his wristwatch, noted it on his clipboard, then removed the cover on the petri dish and stepped away from the cage.

  Martin’s thoughts went back to the trial that had landed him and the girl in the monkey cages. The court martial—the warlord’s term for the proceedings—had started after the lunch break and lasted twenty minutes. Presiding from the makeshift throne on the stage of the auditorium, Hamlet had acted as prosecutor and judge. Martin, his wrists secured with the dogs leash, had been charged with both high and low treason. Almagul, accused of aiding and abetting, had stood behind Martin, nervously whispering translations in his ear. Hamlet had opened the proceedings by announcing that he was absolutely convinced of the guilt of the accused; that the sole purpose of the court martial was to determine the degree of guilt and, eventually, the appropriate punishment.

  “Guilty of what?” Martin had asked after pleading innocent to the formal charge of high and low treason.

  “Guilty of working for a foreign intelligence agency,” Hamlet had shot back. “Guilty of trying to steal Russia’s biowarfare secrets.”

  “My only interest,” Martin had had Almagul say, “is to interview Samat Ugor-Zhilov.” And he had explained about Samat’s humanitarian quest—repatriating to a village in Lithuania the bones of Saint Gedymin in order to obtain the sacred Torah scrolls and bring them to Israel.

  “And where,” Hamlet inquired, leaning forward, cocking his big head so as to better catch Martin’s response, “would Samat find the bones of Saint Gedymin?”

  “I was told he’d traced them to a small Orthodox church near the city of Córdoba in Argentina.”

  “And what,” the warlord continued, his short feet dancing on the ammunition box, “would Samat offer the Argentines in return for the bones of the saint?”

  Martin realized he’d reached the mine field. “I have no idea,” he replied. “That’s one of the questions I wanted to ask Samat.”

  At which point Hamlet launched into a tirade so fierce that Almagul had all she could do to keep up with him. “He says you know very well what Samat would trade, otherwise you would not have come to this island. He says the Russian nuclear arsenal will become obsolete in ten years time and the Americans will rule Russia unless Samat is able to perfect bioweapons to counter the American threat. He says bioweapons are the only cost efficient answer to Russia’s problem. He says it costs $2 million to kill half the population of one square kilometer with missiles loaded with conventional warheads, $80,000 with a nuclear weapon, $600 with a chemical weapon and $1 with a bioweapon. Vozrozhdeniye Island, he reminds you, was once the center of bioweapon research for the Soviet Union: Under Samat’s direction, and with Samat’s financial backing, Vozrozhdeniye is once again developing a bioarsenal that will save Russia from American domination.”

  Hamlet collapsed back into the throne. One of the white coated scientists brought over a porcelain basin filled with water smelling of disinfectant and the warlord rang out the sponge in it and mopped his feverish brow.

  Martin said, very quietly, “Are you suggesting that Samat gave bioweapon seed stock to the Argentineans in exchange for the bones of the saint?”

  “That is not what I am suggesting,” the warlord groaned when he heard Alamgul’s translation. “Is that what I am suggesting?” he asked the scientists in lab coats.

  “Nyet, nyet,” they responded in a discordant chorus.

  “There is the proof,” Hamlet cried, waving toward the scientists as if they were his star witnesses.

  “Then what are you suggesting?” Martin had Almagul ask.

  “Who is on trial here, you or me?” the warlord retorted furiously. “I am not suggesting Samat provided the Argentinean military with bioweapons. I am also not suggesting that he provided them with the orbits of American spy satellites. That rumor is without substance. It is a fact of life, as any idiot knows, that to get high-quality photographs, the spy satellites are obliged to orbit earth at low altitudes, circling the planet in a polar orbit every ninety minutes. It is a fact of life that they are over any one point on the earth’s surface for only a few minutes. If you know when one of the satellites is due overhead, you can suspend operations you do not want the Americans to photograph. India and Pakistan have been doing this for years. So has Iraq. From whence comes the rumor that it is from Saddam Hussein in Iraq that Samat obtained the American satellite orbits that he traded to the Argentines for the bones of the saint.”

  It dawned on Martin that Hamlet and the people around him were stark raving mad; characters that Alice might have come across when she fell down the rabbit hole. He decided it was in his interest to humor the mad warlord. “And what in the world could Samat have given to Saddam Hussein in return for the orbits?”

  Almagul whispered, “It is perilous to know the answer,” but Martin, drunk on state secrets, ordered her to translate the question.

  Hamlet drew his navy revolver from its holster and spun the chamber, sending the ticking sound reverberating through the auditorium. Then he raised the revolver and sighted on Martin’s head and said “Bang, bang, you are extinguished.” He laughed at his little joke and the others in the auditorium laughed with him, albeit somewhat anxiously, so it seemed to Martin. After a moment Hamlet said, “If Samat had wanted to go down that path, he could have traded to Saddam Hussein anthrax spores and hemorrhagic seed viruses that were harvested here on the island in exchange for the orbits.” The warlord lifted the goggles off of his eyes and scratched thoughtfully at the side of his bulbous nose with the barrel of the revolver. A stunted grin materialized on his thick lips. “He could have traded the orbits for the bones of the saint. And the bones of the saint for the Torah scrolls. But it goes without saying, none of this actually happened.”

  Hamlet, tiring of the game, gaveled the butt of his revolver down on the arm of the throne. “You and the girl are guilty as charged and sentenced to the monkey cages, to be used as guinea pigs in our experiments. Case closed. Trial over. Court adjourned.”

  The groaning of the giant scavenger in the last cage shook Martin out of his reverie. Almagul, sitting on the icy floor with her back to the bars in the cage next to Martin, buried her head between her knees. Her body shook with silent sobs. Martin reached through the bars to touch her shoulder. “I recognize the men in the cages,” the girl whispered hoarsely. “They are the ones missing from Nukus. We are all surely going to die like my father and my sister,” she added. “They have already killed six scavengers from Nukus and thrown their bones to the flamingoes. The worst part is that I have no sister to take my name.”

  In the last cage the giant scavenger pitched forward onto his knees, with his head touching the ground, and then rolled onto his side. The scientist filming the test called to the two others in Russian to come over and look. The man with the clipboard produced a large skeleton key and opened the padlock on the monkey cage and the three Russians in lab coats, still wearing their gas masks, ducked inside and crouched around the body. One of them raised the scavenger’s limp wrist and let it flop back again. “Konstantin will be extremely pleased with his ebola—” he started to say when the giant scavenger, bellowing with a primitive furor, sprang to life and began shattering the gas masks and the facial bones of the scientists with his fists. With blood seeping from under their gas masks, two of the scientists crawled on all fours toward the low door of the cage, but the giant caught them by their ankles and hauled them back and, climbing over their bodies, pounded their faces into the cement floor. In the other cages the prisoners called to the giant scavenger to free them, but he kept lifting the heads by the hair and smashing them into the cement. It was Almagul’s voice that finally penetrated to the wild man’s brain. Gasping for air, a maniacal gleam in h
is bulging eyes, the scavenger released his grip on the bloody heads and looked up.

  Almagul called his name and spoke soothingly to him in the strange language of the scavengers. The giant, his arms and shirt drenched in blood, crawled through the door of his cage and staggered to his feet. The other prisoners were all talking to him at once. Almagul spoke quietly to the giant. Martin noticed that mucus was seeping from his nostrils as he lurched across the basement to the stainless steel table, snapped off one of the legs and came back to the cages. One by one he slipped the narrow end of the steel leg through the padlocks and, using the bars for leverage, snapped open the locks. Martin was the last to emerge from the cages. The giant collapsed at his feet—Martin, reaching to help him, found he was burning with fever. “There is nothing we can do for him,” Almagul said. The other scavengers backed away from the fallen man until Almagul snapped angrily at them. One of them came forward and brought the stainless steel table leg down on the giant’s head to put him out of his misery. Then, armed with steel legs from the table and the wooden legs broken off chairs, the scavengers made their way up the stone steps. Almagul, leading the way, carefully opened the steel door leading to the biowarfare laboratory and stepped aside to let the others through. Two Russian scientists napping on cots were strangled to death by the desperate prisoners. Three other scientists were working with frozen anthrax spores in a walk-in refrigerator. Martin thrust one of the stainless steel legs through the door handles, locking the Russians inside, and then turned up the thermostat. The three scientists, realizing they were trapped, began pounding on the thick glass window in the door. One of the prisoners found a plastic jerry can in a closet filled with kerosene for the heating unit. He splashed kerosene over the shelves filled with petri dishes and filing cabinets. Almagul struck a match and tossed it into the spilled kerosene. A bluish fire skidded across the floor. In a moment the laboratory was awash in flames.